Salem Political Snark

Trump is acting like a dictator. Our democracy is dying.

This is the week that pushed me over the edge of being merely concerned about our democracy surviving, to freaking out about the fact that it truly seems threatened by Trump.

Which is scary. 

Being as old as I am -- 70 -- I've lived through Richard Nixon (Watergate), Ronald Reagan (Iran/Contra), Bill Clinton (blow job, yawn), George W. Bush (no Iraq weapons of mass destruction), and various other WTF-is-going-on scandalous presidential behavior.

But Donald Trump is in a league of his own. And that's not a compliment. He's the only president who has refused to abide by norms of generally decent behavior that have allowed our country to remain a vibrant democracy through good times and bad.

Until now I've read books that disturbed me with the possibilities they raised of what could happen to the United States in these Trumpian times. How Democracies Die. The Monarchy of Fear. An Uncivil War.

After this week's events, my brain has jumped from possibility mode to holy shit we're in deep trouble mode.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope our national institutions -- Congress, courts, public opinion, elections -- are up to the job of keeping Trump from becoming the dictator president he clearly wants to be. 

At the moment things don't look very encouraging, though. Let's count some of the reasons I feel this way.

(1) Most Republicans are willing to let Trump do whatever the hell he wants. His Gallup approval rating has jumped six points to 45% recently. Trump's approval among Republicans is 89%, among Democrats 8%, among Independents 39%. But Trump only considers himself president of his base, not the whole country. So he feels entitled and emboldened.

(2) William Barr, his Attorney General, seems determined to be Trump's personal lawyer rather than an impartial dispenser of justice. He unilaterally determined that Trump didn't obstruct justice after Mueller said evidence of this was equivocal. This week Barr claimed that the Trump campaign was "spied" on even though there's no evidence of this. A hit job on people considers to be his enemies seems to be Barr's goal. And Barr is doing his best to keep the Mueller report as hidden as possible.

(3) Trump wanted Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, to close the border with Mexico, even though Nielsen told him this would be illegal. Nielsen then resigned. Now Trump is putting his cronies in charge of immigration policies. Rather than being embarrassed by reporting that a plan to move migrant detainees to sanctuary cities had been considered, but rejected, Trump now is saying he is seriously considering doing this -- an atrocious and likely also illegal move.

(4) The Mueller investigation was treasonous, according to Trump. He's used that term 26 times. Greg Sargent writes, "Because Trump knows the seriousness of the charge, he therefore must be interpreting treason the way King Henry VIII did, in the lèse-majesté sense: Treason is anything that offends the dignity of the sovereign. Disagreement with Trump is an offense against the state, just as Henry executed unfaithful wives for treason."

(5) Trump reportedly offered to pardon the acting Homeland Security director if he violated the law and was arrested for blocking entry into the U.S. along the border with Mexico. That's obstruction of justice, but since his Attorney General believes it is impossible for a president to obstruct justice, Trump feels free to indulge his dictatorial tendencies.

Maybe this is a low point for American democracy and an upswing is coming. If so, it can't come soon enough for me. We can't wait for the 2020 election to make things right. 

And I've got to say that while until now I've scoffed at Bill Maher's contention that if Trump loses the election he won't leave office willingly, that possibility is starting to seem a lot more likely to me.

Pelosi's smirk made watching State of the Union worthwhile

I've never skipped a State of the Union address, but this year it crossed my mind. Well, just a few seconds of Trump's overly long and mostly boring speech made me glad that I watched it live.

Nancy Pelosi's closed-eyes smirk of condescension, which was preceded by some eloquent eye-rolling, was a memorable moment. It followed Trump's ridiculous claim that the only thing standing between us and prosperity is... investigations into wrongdoing by Trump and his cohorts.

“An economic miracle is taking place in the United States — and the only thing that can stop it are foolish wars, politics or ridiculous partisan investigations,” he said. “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation. It just doesn’t work that way!”

Hmmm. Interesting bit of illogic.

My literary sensibility says that, in the second sentence above, peace and legislation should be contrasted with -- no big surprise -- contrasting words. War does indeed contrast with peace, but how does investigation contrast with legislation? 

Only in Trump's enfeebled brain, apparently. It could well be that he wrote this line and liked how both words ended in tion. And maybe he really does believe that if Democrats investigate him, there's no way he would sign any bipartisan legislation.

But the first part of his speech was all about coming together, bridging political divides, patching over differences for the good of the country. All that feel-goodness was erased by his petulant demand that unless investigations stop, legislation is a no-go. 

Which made much of the rest of his speech politically irrelevant.

Democrats aren't going to stop investigating all things Trumpian. Neither is Mueller. Nor are other federal investigators in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere. 

So if Trump wants an infrastructure bill, lower drug prices, money to end HIV, family leave benefits, and stronger border security, he's going to have to suck it up and accept that investigation isn't an antonym of legislation. 

Aside from the Pelosi smirk, here's some other things that I enjoyed in tonight's State of the Union address:

-- Seeing the contrast between dark-suited Republican men, mostly, standing and applauding Trump's applause lines while on the other side of the aisle white-clad Democratic women, mostly, sat in their chairs.

-- Watching Democrats look quizzically at each other when Trump spoke words that sounded sort of like something that deserved standing up and clapping for, but nobody wanted to be the first to do this. At first I thought that Dems would follow Pelosi's lead on the standing up front. However, in line with the progressive "herding cats" dictum, fairly early on the Democratic legislators tended to do their own thing.

-- Observing the women in white, who were honoring women's suffrage/fight for rights, stand and applaud each other raucously when Trump noted that more women were in Congress than ever before. What he failed to say, of course, was that many of those women are newly elected Democrats who surfed to victory on a 2018 Blue Wave of opposition to Trump.

Of course, I also spent quite a bit of time screaming "liar" at the TV. Per usual, Trump said a lot of things that weren't true. The Washington Post fact-checkers did a great job cataloging his falsehoods, along with some occasional truth-telling.

The frequent references to World War II, D-Day, Nazis, and concentration camps seemed off-base to me. Sure, these are important subjects. However, they have little or nothing to do with the current State of the Union. Seemingly the veterans and war heroes were dragged out for applause-line purposes, which struck me as wrong. 

As did using the child with brain cancer to buttress Trump's call for $500 million (I think it was) to support medical research in the area of childhood cancer. This from a  president who has been horribly anti-science and wants to do away with the Affordable Care Act without proposing any viable health insurance alternative.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Donald Trump. 

Here's how to tell Howard Schultz "Don't run for president"

If Howard Schultz, the ex-CEO of Starbucks, runs for president as an independent, there's too high a risk that he will siphon off enough votes to enable Donald Trump to win a second term in 2020. 

So here's how to tell Schultz, "Don't run for president." 

There's a Contact Us link on his website, though it isn't very obvious, being at the bottom of the site pages. That's why I'm sharing the link -- to make it easier for people to urge Schultz to hold off on his vanity presidential campaign. It's https://www.howardschultz.com/contact-us

Naturally you can say whatever you like in your message to Schultz. This is what I said:

Please don't run for president as an independent. If you do, there's too great a chance you'll make Trump the winner in 2020. And if you do, I promise that I won't ever enter another Starbucks, and I'll urge everyone I know to do the same.

If you need persuading that Schultz could tilt the 2020 election to Trump, read a New York Times opinion piece, "Howard Schultz, Please Don't Run for President." Excerpt:

There are policies that could potentially break the two-party stranglehold on our politics. Ranked-choice voting, which Maine used for the 2018 congressional elections, lets voters select candidates in order of preference. One by one, the candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated. Their supporters’ votes are apportioned to those voters’ next-highest choice, until someone emerges with a majority.

If Schultz were serious about challenging party monopolies he might invest some of his fortune in efforts to pass similar reforms elsewhere.

Absent such changes, his candidacy would threaten to siphon away enough votes to give Trump a second term.

In 2015 and 2016, Bloomberg, a billionaire businessman whose politics are much like Schultz’s, considered mounting an independent campaign for president. His team looked closely at poll data and focus groups, and found he’d be potentially competitive only in blue states. “All of the results were very consistent,” Howard Wolfson, Bloomberg’s political adviser told me. “An independent with Mike’s profile would have merely resulted in Trump’s election.”

Trump has to be the worst presidential deal-maker ever

For someone who had a book ghostwritten for him called "The Art of the Deal," Donald Trump is a notably shitty dealmaker.

So far in his presidency he's noted for breaking deals -- Paris climate change agreement, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Iran nuclear agreement -- rather than making them. Which figures. Blowing stuff up is a hell of a lot easier than putting stuff together.

The worst thing I can say about Trump is that I consider myself a better dealmaker than he is. And my credentials aren't exactly sterling.

Once I was negotiating with a guy in our carport about a car I was selling. After some talking, it turned out that the guy was the mirror image of me. I was saying, "I feel like the price I'm asking is a bit high," and the other guy was saying, "This car is in such great shape, it's worth more than you're asking."

After we realized the absurdity of what was happening, we laughed and agreed on a price that both of us were happy with.

Which is the essence of a deal, isn't it? Reaching an agreement that makes both sides pleased, even if in reality, one side is getting more out of the deal.

In negotiating with Democratic Congressional leaders about the partial government shutdown and Trump's obsessive desire for border wall funding, it seems clear that Trump has no idea how to handle talks with people who aren't intimidated by him.

This likely is a first for Trump, since he seems to have gotten by in his previous business life by using threats, lawsuits, lies, broken promises, and bravado to get what he wanted. None of those things are going to work with Pelosi and Schumer. They're way more experienced at political dealmaking than Trump is.

What blows my mind the most about his negotiating incompetence is this: he and his Republican surrogates already have made clear how desperate Trump is to get funding for something he can call a "wall." 

News stories have made clear that if Trump can't fulfill this campaign promise (even if Mexico doesn't pay for it), he and his fellow Republicans consider that the chance of him winning reelection in 2020 is low. So unlike a car salesman who tells a customer, "This is my best offer, take it or leave it," Trump has staked out a position of "I'm screwed if I don't get wall funding."

Not surprisingly, Trump's desperation makes Congressional Democrats even more determined not to give him what he so obviously can't live without.

Thus Trump is reduced to making threats about invoking a presidential power to declare a border security emergency, which carries with it a lot of problems of its own. Such as being possibly illegal and decidedly unpopular with everyone but his base, since he'd take money out of the Defense Department budget earmarked for other purposes.

Here's another of Trump's weaknesses that makes him a terrible dealmaker: he lacks empathy. 

Now, taken to extremes this isn't a great attribute for dealmakers. In the car-buying/selling anecdote I shared above, the other guy and I were each overly empathetic. I was visualizing how I'd feel about buying my car, even though I was selling it, and the other guy was visualizing how he'd feel if he was selling the car, even though he was buying it.

But if someone can't put themselves in the other person's shoes, or rather, mind, they're going to have a difficult time getting that person to agree to a deal. 

I'm pretty sure Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are well aware of how badly Trump wants his wall.

However, I'm deeply doubtful that Donald Trump understands how badly Pelosi and Schumer need to hold the line on wall funding -- given the results of the midterm elections where voters overwhelmingly said no way to Trump's border wall fear-mongering.

A compromise on reopening the government seems eminently possible. Yet this requires Trump to do some empathizing that he doesn't seem capable of. Trump needs to take a Democratic "yes" for an answer.

Yes, the Dems are saying, we agree that border security needs to be stronger. They are open to funding a host of border security to-do's, including fencing, so long as nothing looks like what Trump would call a wall. But given how Trump shamelessly lies about everything, he also could lie about an agreement to reopen the government. 

I can picture him saying to his base, "The Democrats want to call it fencing rather than a wall, but we know what they really agreed to: a wall." Likewise, Pelosi and Schumer could say, "Trump wants to call it a wall rather than fencing,  but we know what he really agreed to: fencing."

Both sides have to feel like they won in order to strike a deal between equals. Until Trump realizes this, the standoff between him and the Democrats is going to continue -- with 800,000 government workers stuck in the middle without pay.

Wanted: an entity to save us from Trump. No experience required.

After enduring today's Trump news, which surpassed in scariness anything our Idiot in Chief has brought us since he became president, I'm reduced to viewing this blog post as akin to a message in the bottle.

Yes, I'm that desperate after:

-- seeing the stock market drop almost 500 points (again)
-- having the (competent) Secretary of Defense resign after Trump ordered him to remove all U.S. troops from Syria, a really bad idea
-- observing Trump go back on a promise (no big surprise) to sign a continuing resolution keeping the government open, so it looks like a Christmas Trump shutdown will happen
-- learning that the acting Attorney General refuses to recuse himself from overseeing the Mueller investigation after handpicking people in the Justice Department to advise him on this issue who (predictably) said it was just fine and dandy for him to be Mueller's overlord

I'm a long-time political junkie.

But I've never been so worried about the future of our country, and the world. Trump is the first president in my lifetime who lacks both any sense of morality or decency and is utterly incompetent to manage his own business affairs, much less serve as the leader of the free world.

Worse, Trump doesn't even want a free world. He prefers dictators to democracy, lies to liberty, hatred to helping others. 

Since Republicans seem content to let Trump carry on with his craziness, even if he drags the country down into a pit of economic, cultural, and existential despair, I'm calling out for help to some admittedly unlikely sources.

People of the future, if you've mastered time travel, send someone back to 2016 and prevent Jim Comey from holding forth on Hillary Clinton's damn emails. Plus, stop the Russians from interfering in the election and colluding with the Trump campaign.

Alien beings from an advanced civilization, if you're monitoring blog posts, take this one to heart. Feel free to hover a spaceship over Washington D.C. and beam up all members of the Trump administration to a prison planet in a galaxy far, far away. Then instruct the people of Earth to never let any more narcissistic psychopaths lead a country. 

I hope my fears are misguided.

I hope our country survives the last two years of the Trump presidency. I'm just deeply worried that given what happened today, Trump's descent into total meltdown is accelerating. After all, he still commands the nuclear codes.

Hey, I lived through the Cuban missile crisis. I was an elementary school student in California when we couldn't drink milk for a while because of above-ground nuclear tests in Nevada. I remember when home fallout shelters were all the rage, along with "duck and cover" drills in schools (as if these would work in a nuclear holocaust). 

But this is different.

I've always felt that the leader of our country was competent, even if I vehemently disagreed with his policies. Trump is hugely more terrifying, because not only is he incompetent, he believes in his own bullshit -- and he refuses to have anybody around him who challenges that crap.

In the short-term, we'll muddle through.

I suspect the government shutdown over the $5 billion Trump wants for his stupid border wall will last just two weeks. Once the Democrats take control of the House in January, Nancy Pelosi will pass a bill that restores back pay for government workers and funds the government, minus money for the wall. 

The Senate will go along, ending that problem. Which leaves all the other self-created Trump problems, plus whatever new ones he cooks up between now and then. 

So that's why I'm calling out to time travelers and alien beings. Desperate times demand desperate measures. Someone needs to stop Trump from wrecking our country and a large part of the world prior to November 2020, when I'm confident he will be voted out of office. 

Maybe Democrats and Republicans in Congress, with the aid of Mueller, are up to the job. I'm just worried that they aren't. 

 

Here's what Trump didn't say about the pipe bombs

I'm going to channel my inner Stephen Colbert for a moment.

Today seven pipe bombs were discovered to have been sent to six people: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, George Soros, John Brennan, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and Maxine Waters. Holder was supposed to get a bomb, but it was misaddressed, so it was sent to a fake return address belonging to Schultz.

Because these were all people that Donald Trump has insulted, sometimes viciously, and Trump has called journalists the "enemy of the people" -- Brennan's bomb was sent to CNN, where he works as an analyst -- along with calling Democrats "evil," it was great that Trump apologized at a campaign rally for his incendiary insults, vowing to moderate his tone so as not to add fuel to the fire that led to someone making and sending the bombs.

No... just kidding. Of course Trump didn't do this.

This is the sort of shtick that Colbert frequently engages in -- leading his audience to think that Trump has done something reasonable and presidential for once, then revealing that what he actually did was something quite different. 

One would think that so long as Trump was going to appear at a campaign-type rally in Wisconsin tonight, he'd use that event to bring the nation together after the Democrats, and Democratic sympathizers (that's how I'd characterize Brennan, CIA Director under Obama) were targeted by the pipe bombs.

After all, earlier in the day Trump had said, “We have to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message that acts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America.”

Somebody else must have written that line for him, because soon after Trump was blaming the media for those threats of political violence, even though Trump bears the most responsibility for inciting violence against those he disagrees with. 

MOSINEE, Wis. — President Trump blamed the media and others for incivility after a string of homemade bombs were sent to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, former president Barack Obama and others, even as he refrained from acknowledging his own inflammatory rhetoric at a rally here Wednesday evening.

...“The media also has a responsibility to set a civil tone and to stop the endless hostility and constant negative — and oftentimes, false — attacks and stories,” Trump said.

In an apparent swipe at Democrats, Trump denounced those who “carelessly compare political opponents to historical villains” and who “mob people in public places or destroy public property.”

The president, who has frequently used nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” or “Crooked Hillary” to mock his rivals, called for those in the political arena to “stop treating their opponents as morally defective.”

Every day, it becomes more clear that an egotistical asshole occupies the White House. I really can't think of one good thing to say about Donald Trump. 

He lies incessantly. He cozies up to dictators and disrespects our allies. He exhibits zero compassion. He is acting more and more like an authoritarian. He has no sense of decency. He takes pride in breaking every norm of how a president should behave.

Dana Milbank gets it right in a Washington Post column he wrote today.

What hath Trump wrought?

...Trump recently maligned all the targets of Wednesday’s attack. Thirty-six hours earlier, Trump fired up yet more “Lock her up!” and “CNN sucks!” chants. He roiled the crowd to boo “low IQ” Waters. Trump spread false conspiracy theories that Soros funded the migrant caravan and anti-Brett M. Kavanaugh protesters. After Holder said “when they go low, we kick them,” Trump threatened: “He’d better be careful what he’s wishing for.” Trump called Brennan “a total lowlife” and a “very bad guy” who “disgraced the country.”

...But one public figure’s rhetoric has been more violent than all others, and he has the biggest megaphone.

He encouraged supporters to “knock the crap out of” protesters and offered to pay attackers’ legal bills. He expressed his wish to punch a heckler in the face. He urged police not to “be too nice” to suspects. He shared a doctored video of himself attacking CNN in a wrestling match. He suggested supporters could use guns to stop Clinton judicial nominees and fantasized about Clinton’s security detail being taken away.

Most recently, Trump hesitated to criticize Saudi Arabia for Saudi operatives’ killing of Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi as the president keeps up his attacks on journalists as enemies of the people.

I'll tell you who the biggest enemy of the people actually is: Donald Trump. I can't wait for 2020 to come, so we, the people, can dump Trump. 

Oregon is #1 in ease of voting. I show why.

Oregonians are appropriately proud of our beautiful, prosperous, progressive state. Now we have another reason to feel superior: Oregon is the easiest place to vote among all 50 states.

A professor in the Political Science Department at Northern Illinois University was the lead author of the study, described in "New study scrutinizes time and effort it takes to vote in each state."

Here's the characteristics that make for easy voting:

Oregon has had mail-in voting since 1998, when we became the first state to conduct all elections by mail. We have automatic voter registration via drivers license info, thanks to a bill signed by Governor Kate Brown in 2016. Ballots arrive in the mail about three weeks before election day, which gives plenty of time to vote.

All we need to do is sign the ballot and mail it back so it's received by 8 pm on election day (or drop it in a ballot box, many of which are drive-up). Oregon has online voter registration. People convicted of a felony can't vote while they're in jail, but their voting rights are restored upon their release.

On the down side, voter registration has to occur 21 days before an election in order to be able to vote in that election. 

So all in all, Oregon deserves its #1 ease of voting ranking. I've lived in Oregon since 1971, so I've experienced both the agony of driving to a voting location and standing in line to cast a ballot, and the ecstasy of voting at home.

Which I'm pleased to show.

My ballot for the November 6, 2018 election arrived in the mail a few days ago. Tonight I sat at our kitchen counter, coffee and pen at the ready, and filled in the ballot.

I couldn't find the Marion County Voter's Pamphlet that came in the mail, so I perused the online version to decide on some local judge races. That task completed, I put the ballot in an envelope, signed the back of the envelope, and affixed a stamp.

Done!

Every state should vote by mail. This week there was early voting in Georgia. Reportedly it took two hours to cast a ballot. That's crazy. No one should have to put up with that. Too many states treat voters badly, making it way too difficult to vote.

Currently only Oregon, Washington, and Colorado have 100% vote by mail. But there's hope: a graphic in the ease of voting study shows how states shifted between 1996 and 2016. Oregon used to rank #27. Now we're #1. 

Voters just need to elect state politicians who vow to expand and protect voting rights. Of course, in many states where it's difficult to vote, that's tough to do.

Still, this Oregonian's advice is: Wait in lines. Put up with bad voting laws. Then vote out those who are standing in the way of reforms. Believe me, it's worth the time and trouble to make voting easy for everybody. 

Never lose your anger at Jamal Khashoggi's murder

I've become obsessed with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi Arabia hit squad, and the Trump administration's despicable attempt to absolve Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of that country (who goes by MBS, which I translate at Murdering Big Shit) of a horrendous crime.

Since Khashoggi's death, many times a day I check my iPhone or laptop to see what new information about his murder has come to light. I'm pleased with my anger. I don't want to lose it. And I hope that lots of Americans express their own anger in the upcoming mid-term election by voting for Democrats -- which means, against Trump.

Today I saw that someone on Twitter said that now we can add "aiding and abetting a murderer" to the long list of Trump's misdeeds. 

This isn't far from the truth. In fact, at the moment it seems to be absolutely true. The Washington Post reported this today:

The Trump administration and the Saudi royal family are searching for a mutually agreeable explanation for the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi — one that will avoid implicating Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is among the president’s closest foreign allies, according to analysts and officials in multiple countries.

But it will be difficult for the young ruler to escape scrutiny, as mounting evidence points not only to the Saudi government’s knowledge of Khashoggi’s fate, but also to a connection by Mohammed to his disappearance.

"Searching for a mutually acceptable explanation" for Khashoggi's death -- WOW.

The truth doesn't matter to Trump, or his lapdog Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who was all smiles when he met with MDS yesterday in Saudi Arabia. They're leaving it up to Saudi leaders to investigate Khashoggi's murder in the Saudi consulate, which is akin to O.J. Simpson's search for the "real killer."

All Simpson had to do was look in the mirror. Ditto with Mohammed bin Salman.

Khashoggi is shown on video walking into the Saudi embassy. He never came out.  Today Turkish officials spoke about what happened to Khashoggi, as reported by the New York Times.

Saudi agents were waiting when Jamal Khashoggi walked into their country’s consulate in Istanbul two weeks ago. Mr. Khashoggi was dead within minutes, beheaded, dismembered, his fingers severed, and within two hours the killers were gone, according to details from audio recordings described by a senior Turkish official on Wednesday.

...The new leaks, which were also splashed in lurid detail across a pro-government newspaper, came a day after Mr. Pompeo and the Trump administration had appeared to accept at face value the promises of the Saudi rulers to conduct their own investigation into Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance — regardless of Turkish assertions that senior figures in the royal court had ordered his killing.

As the Saudis and the Americans tried to put the crisis behind them, the brutality described in the leaks served as a reminder of why Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance has triggered an international backlash more severe than countless mass killings or rights violations.

"His fingers severed." We don't know whether Khashoggi was alive or dead when this happened. 

Regardless, let's never forget the courage of this brave journalist, who was a permanent American resident who wrote a column for the Washington Post. And again, let's never forget our anger at MDS and Trump, both of whom are complicit in Khashoggi's murder.

Trump loves to call journalists the "enemy of the people." That's music to the ears of authoritarians like MDS.

They know that under Trump's failed leadership, the United States no longer has any moral standing in the w0rld. All Trump cares about is money and power. He's said that even if MBS murdered Khashoggi, American arms sales to Saudi Arabia must move forward.

A few Republicans are criticizing Trump's attempt to excuse Khashoggi's death and dismemberment. But only a few. Trump gets away with this crap because his supporters are willing to put up with horrible stuff, so long as they get tax cuts for the rich and conservative judges.

This is why voting for Democrats honors Jamal Khashoggi. So long as Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress, there can't be effective oversight of Trump's horrific behavior. 

Yes, a lot of what Trump does is ridiculous. But turning a blind eye to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi isn't funny in the slightest. For me, it is one of the worst things Trump has done since he became president, and believe me, he has done a lot of bad things in the past two years.

Khashoggi went into the Saudi consulate to get a divorce document so he could get married the next day. The Crown Prince must have ordered his murder, since so many of the hit squad were closely linked to MBS, and they arrived and departed from Istanbul on Saudi jets.

Plus, Saudi Arabia is tightly controlled by the Royal Family, so the notion of "rogue agents" Trump is trying to peddle makes no sense.

Tomorrow the Washington Post is publishing Khashoggi's final column, written shortly before he was murdered. It's titled "What the Arab world needs most is free expression." Here's some excerpts from the online version:

My dear friend, the prominent Saudi writer Saleh al-Shehi, wrote one of the most famous columns ever published in the Saudi press. He unfortunately is now serving an unwarranted five-year prison sentence for supposed comments contrary to the Saudi establishment.

The Egyptian government’s seizure of the entire print run of a newspaper, al-Masry al Youm, did not enrage or provoke a reaction from colleagues. These actions no longer carry the consequence of a backlash from the international community. Instead, these actions may trigger condemnation quickly followed by silence.

As a result, Arab governments have been given free rein to continue silencing the media at an increasing rate. There was a time when journalists believed the Internet would liberate information from the censorship and control associated with print media.

But these governments, whose very existence relies on the control of information, have aggressively blocked the Internet. They have also arrested local reporters and pressured advertisers to harm the revenue of specific publications.

Brave words like these led to Khashoggi's murder by cowardly Saudi leaders, almost certainly led by Mohammed bin Salman. There's no good that has come from Khashoggi's death.

However, many more people now are going to read his columns. Hopefully one day we will be able to look back and view his murder as a turning point that led to much-needed reforms in Saudi Arabia and other repressive Muslim nations.

Let's throw Kavanaugh's angry, ugly words back at the GOP

A week ago Brett Kavanaugh said, in his off-the-rails bizarre tirade against his made-up Democratic conspiracy to deny him a Supreme Court seat, "What goes around, comes around." 

Nobody really knows what this threat meant, not even Politifact. 

Doesn't matter. Those of us who are opposed to Kavanaugh, which includes everyone who cares about women's rights, can appropriate those words for our own purposes.

If Kavanaugh is confirmed this weekend, as seems highly possible, we need to channel our entirely justified outrage at how the White House manipulated the FBI background check for its own political purpose into making the Republican Party pay dearly for their support of a man who almost certainly is a serial sexual abuser, and absolutely certainly is a habitual liar. 

Voting for Democrats in the November midterms is Job #1. And not just those running for a federal office -- state and local races are just as important. 

Here's a list of progressives running for office in the Salem area who need our support:

Marion County Commissioner #1: Shelaswau Crier
Marion County Commissioner #2: Bill Burgess
Senate District 10: Deb Patterson
Senate District 11: Peter Courtney
Senate District 13: Sarah Grider
House District 17: Renee Windsor-White
House District 18: Barry Shapiro
House District 19: Mike Ellison
House District 20: Paul Evans
House District 21: Brian Clem
House District 22: Teresa Alonso Leon
House District 23: Danny Jaffer
House District 25: Dave McCall

And naturally it is super-important to re-elect Governor Kate Brown, because while Republican Knute Buehler tries to look moderate, you can bet that if he were to beat Brown, he'd become a heck of a lot more right-wing in a heartbeat.

So yeah, as much as I dislike quoting anything Brett "I love beer!" Kavanaugh says, he's right that in politics, what goes around does come around. 

Actions produce reactions.

And the despicable way Republicans have treated Christine Blasey Ford and the other women who have accused Kavanaugh of sexual attacks deserves some really strong pushback. It'd be great if Democrats beat the odds and retook both the House and Senate this November. 

Failing that, at least the House of Representatives.

This would give Democrats a platform to hold hearings on the farce of the FBI background check that started last Friday and ended yesterday -- without any interviews of Ford or Kavanaugh, nor of the many people eager to testify that Kavanaugh was lying about his drinking habits and partying lifestyle in high school and college.

Looking ahead to 2020, more and more I'm liking Michael Avenatti's call that serious consideration be given to expanding the Supreme Court to eleven seats should the Democrats win back the presidency and both houses of Congress. 

Such would be a perfect "what goes around, comes around," given that one Supreme Court seat (now held by Gorsuch) should have been filled by President Obama, and the other Supreme Court seat (which may be held by Kavanaugh) involved a severely truncated FBI investigation into the accusations against Kavanaugh, following an election that Trump likely won only because of Russian meddling. 

Of course, it isn't certain that Kavanaugh is going to be approved by the Senate. Politics always is full of surprises. The next few days may reveal that a few Senate Republicans actually are willing to do the right thing, rather than the expedient thing. We can only hope.

Solid evidence that Russia caused Trump to win the 2016 election

Just when I thought I couldn't be more disturbed about Donald Trump becoming president, an article appeared in the October 1, 2018 issue of The New Yorker that got me increasingly angry and upset. 

Why?


Because Jane Mayer, who wrote "Russia Won" (online title: "How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump"), describes in convincing detail the findings of Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a scholar with solid credentials who wrote a soon-to-be-released book, Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President -- What We Don't, Can't, and Do Know.

Download How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump | The New Yorker

Here's a few paragraphs from The New Yorker piece that give an overview of why Jamieson is confident that Russia made the difference in the 2016 presidential election.

She is seventy-one, and has spent forty years studying political speeches, ads, and debates. Since 1993, she has directed the Annenberg Public Policy Center, at Penn, and in 2003 she co-founded FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan watchdog group. She is widely respected by political experts in both parties, though her predominantly male peers have occasionally mocked her scholarly intensity, calling her the Drill Sergeant.

As Steven Livingston, a professor of political communication at George Washington University, puts it, “She is the epitome of a humorless, no-nonsense social scientist driven by the numbers. She doesn’t bullshit. She calls it straight.”

Indeed, when I met recently with Jamieson, in a book-lined conference room at the Annenberg Center, in Philadelphia, and asked her point-blank if she thought that Trump would be President without the aid of Russians, she didn’t equivocate. “No,” she said, her face unsmiling. Clearly cognizant of the gravity of her statement, she clarified, “If everything else is a constant? No, I do not.”

Jamieson said that, as an academic, she hoped that the public would challenge her arguments. Yet she expressed confidence that unbiased readers would accept her conclusion that it is not just plausible that Russia changed the outcome of the 2016 election—it is “likely that it did.”

An airtight case, she acknowledges, may never be possible. In the introduction to her new book, she writes that any case for influence will likely be similar to that in a civil legal trial, “in which the verdict is rendered not with the certainty that e=mc² but rather based on the preponderance of evidence.”

But, she points out, “we do make most of life’s decisions based on less-than-rock-solid, incontrovertible evidence.” In Philadelphia, she noted to me that “we convict people on probabilities rather than absolute certainty, and we’ve executed people based on inferences from available evidence.” She argued that “the standard of proof being demanded” by people claiming it’s impossible to know whether Russia delivered the White House to Trump is “substantially higher than the standard of proof we ordinarily use in our lives.”

Her case is based on a growing body of knowledge about the electronic warfare waged by Russian trolls and hackers—whom she terms “discourse saboteurs”—and on five decades’ worth of academic studies about what kinds of persuasion can influence voters, and under what circumstances.

Democracies around the world, she told me, have begun to realize that subverting an election doesn’t require tampering with voting machines. Extensive studies of past campaigns, Jamieson said, have demonstrated that “you can affect people, who then change their decision, and that alters the outcome.” She continued, “I’m not arguing that Russians pulled the voting levers. I’m arguing that they persuaded enough people to either vote a certain way or not vote at all.”

The effect of such manipulations could be momentous in an election as close as the 2016 race, in which Clinton got nearly 2.9 million more votes than Trump, and Trump won the Electoral College only because some eighty thousand votes went his way in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

In two hundred and twenty-four pages of extremely dry prose, with four appendixes of charts and graphs and fifty-four pages of footnotes, Jamieson makes a strong case that, in 2016, “Russian masterminds” pulled off a technological and political coup. Moreover, she concludes, the American media “inadvertently helped them achieve their goals.”

There's a lot of interesting, and depressing, facts in The New Yorker story, and Jamieson's book surely contains many more. Some have been reported previously, such as the 126 million Facebook users reached by Russian disinformation posts, and the 50,000 impostor accounts acknowledged by Twitter. 

Since, as noted above, only about 80,000 votes in three states -- Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin -- gave the election to Trump, Joel Benenson, a Clinton pollster, is quoted as saying that 680,000 votes were cast in those three states for third-party candidates. So if only 12% of those third-party voters were persuaded not to vote for Clinton by Russian propaganda, the story says that Jamieson's theory could be valid.

Near the end of the story, I read about something I wasn't at all aware of, even though it was reported by the Washington Post six months after the election.

In 2016 the FBI had gotten unverified Russian intelligence describing emails that supposedly were written by Loretta Lynch, Attorney General in the Obama administration, and sent to someone in the Clinton campaign. The fake emails said that Lynch promised to go easy on Clinton, as regards her infamous email server, I presume. 

FBI Director James Comey was worried that even though the emails had been assessed as 'junk," if they became public conservatives would make a big deal out of them. So Comey decided to bypass his superior, Lynch, and announce on his own the decision not to charge Clinton with any wrongdoing regarding how she handled her emails.

Mayer's story says:

Nick Merrill, a former Clinton-campaign spokesman, describes Comey’s actions as “mind-blowing.” He said of the intelligence impugning Lynch, “It was a Russian forgery. But Comey based major decisions in the Justice Department on Russian disinformation because of the optics of it! The Russians targeted the F.B.I., hoping they’d act on it, and then he went ahead and did so.”

Thus not only were the Russians successful in swaying voters to either vote for Trump, or not vote for Clinton, they also succeeded in influencing Comey to hold his press conference where he talked at length, often in ways that made Clinton look bad, about the decision not to charge Clinton.

Mayer adds:

Adam Schiff, the Democratic representative who is the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, told me that, if you take Comey at his word that the fake intelligence drove his decision to publicly censor Clinton in the first place—there are skeptics who suspect that Comey’s grandstanding moralism was a bigger factor—then “it probably was the most measurable” and “the most significant way in which the Russians may have impacted the outcome of the election.”

Bottom line: when Jamieson's book is released on October 3 (according to Amazon), it will be in the midst of the contentious effort of Republicans to confirm Trump's second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. 

The book will remind Americans that most likely it was Russian interference in the 2016 election that gave Trump his victory, and ability to shape the Supreme Court for decades to come. Thus both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are illicit nominees, which makes Michael Avenatti's call to enlarge the Court to eleven members when the Democrats return to power look quite fair.